Running Up That Hill (And Dealing With God)

This is the deal I’d make with God: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future.

Lately, I can’t stop thinking about God. Not with the intention of converting to any particular strain of religion. But on a walk with my dog, I look up at the goldenrod crests of tipu trees and imagine an enormous paintbrush tapping each cluster of leaves and think, That’s God. When I run by the beach at dusk, I enter clouds of gnats and inevitably get some of them stuck like misplaced lashes in my eyes—that’s God too.

It’s not just nature that makes me lapse into rapture: I read a short story that happens to crescendo along a song I’ve heard a million times before but not like this, and the tears that swell in my eyes seem cartoonishly fake except they’re very real and so is the emotion that expands stellate somewhere between my throat and my chest, radiating out from a full-body psychic arrow piercing.

For people who didn’t grow up with God, we find other ways to access what “God” represents, usually as a resource, usually working off of the assumption that we aren’t missing anything, that what we’re looking for just goes by another name. Maybe “art” or “science” or “vibes.” As simple as swapping in brown sugar for white or egg yolks for whites, which is to say not at all. But you make do with what you have; I can’t change the Saturdays I spent zoning out during Chinese school into attendance at a house of worship, for example.

But I’ve already changed something that shouldn’t be changeable: Over the past three years, I’ve been steadily recasting my physical body through a combination of working out, eating better, and weekly testosterone injections. I’m now a living record of cognitive dissonance settling into harmony, but within this still-novel satisfaction I find myself unsettled in a not bad but new way. For the first time in my big adult life, I ponder: What is my body’s purpose within all this creation? What has my body become? What will my body become? And who am I within it, beyond it, yet surely buried or burned with it when it’s my turn to go?

Why the newfound fascination? I blame a recent milestone birthday, a long strange summer, and Dame Catherine Bush, also known as Kate.

*

Let’s rewind.

Thanks to a memorable sync on the Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things, this year’s song of the summer was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” Released in 1985, “RUTH” is yet another data point in favor of “bringback” culture, a kicky name for nostalgia ultra in media across mediums. The “RUTH”/Stranger Things sync achieved the rare feat of both being expected—the song was a hit back in its day and thus accessible within the world of the show, set in the ’80s—and sublimely weird to younger listeners who’d never encountered Bush’s idiosyncratic baroque pop before. “RUTH” was also recently memorably synced in the television shows Pose and It’s a Sin, but this time around, it slipped into some larger collective lack. As of this writing, it’s been on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for thirty-six weeks.

“RUTH” spends the majority of its runtime pacing around a now-familiar stanza: “And if I only could / I’d make a deal with God / And I’d get him to swap our places / Be running up that road / Be running up that hill / Be running up that building.” Much fuss has been paid to the “hill,” but sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor. Bush’s original choice for the title was “A Deal With God,” relegated as subtitle so as not to ruffle religious listeners’ feathers.

Despite over a decade of listening to the song (first via a cover by the British band Placebo) and five or so years of serious Kate Bush fandom, I didn’t think deeply about “RUTH” until, bored one afternoon, I looked up the lyrics on Genius and clicked upon a curious annotation taken from a transcript from a 1992 radio interview with Bush (emphasis mine):

“I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each [other’s] roles, if we could actually be in each [other’s] place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised! And I think it would lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either . . . you know, I thought a deal with the devil. . . . And I thought, ‘Well, no, why not a deal with God!’ You know, because in a way it’s so much more powerful, the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you.”

Bush’s pivot from the devil to God reminded me of something I read recently in an interview with the musician Ethel Cain, whose music often invokes God:

“Satan is not in control; Satan doesn’t have any power; God is what’s scary. God is all powerful, all-knowing, puts Satan in his place, if we’re going by biblical mythology. If you want power, if you want horror, you have to go to the biggest boss.”

So in at least one read, “RUTH” functions as both a psalm of understanding and a warning about its limits. An invitation to transgress boundaries and a capitulation to the violence of intimacy. (No wonder “RUTH” was used to underscore those ideas in Pose and It’s A Sin, both dramatic explorations of queer life in the ’80s and ’90s.) More plainly, the better you know or can read the other person, the better you can trick them, if you want to. In some ways, invoking God is invoking cruelty; since God knows everything about you, God can hurt you the easiest of them all.

And thus the “deal” in question plays out like one of those children’s games where someone places their palms out and asks you to touch your palms to theirs: “Do you wanna feel how it feels? / Do you wanna know, know that it doesn’t hurt me?” But the premise of the game is that they’ll pull their palms away—or more humiliatingly still, pull them away and then slap your trusting hands: “You don’t wanna hurt me / But see how deep the bullet lies.”

In some ways, invoking God is invoking cruelty; since God knows everything about you, God can hurt you the easiest of them all.

In the song’s bridge, Bush is guileless and earnest, bringing her voice low and teasing to coo, “Let me steal this moment from you now,” then switching for a more plaintive tone to cry, “Let’s exchange the experience.” She wants you to understand that “we both matter” before chasing it with “don’t we?” A hesitation even as she insists she would inhabit you, if she only could. If it were up to her—but it’s not. And even if God could intervene, that doesn’t mean you won’t suffer something.

Bush sings in the opening line, “It doesn’t hurt me.” When you’ve been slapped enough times, you begin to feel numb.

*

Amid Bush’s extensive arté oeuvre of music video work, the one for “RUTH” is a fairly straightforward interpretation, just a woman (Bush) and a man (the dancer Michael Hervieu) performing a tightly shot, gorgeously choreographed dance along with, all right, some running. Until something wicked their way comes: phalanxes of bodies adorned in the same skirtlike hakama pants and dove-gray long-sleeve shirts (though worn backward) as Bush and Hervieu. These otherwise anonymous bodies, which possess secondary sex characteristics if you squint, have one peculiar adornment: masks of Hervieu’s face, then Bush’s.

As they enter the set, Hervieu exits—pulls his hands, if you will—and Bush is held captive in the swarm. Maybe you’re supposed to imagine that the bodies that fill these frames are different from hers, the body in focus. Yet set in concert with the song itself, “RUTH” the video becomes a visual treatment of corporeal disassembly.

“You wanna feel how it feels?” Give into what isn’t you, but what could be you; transition by any other name. “Is there so much hate for the ones we love?” Dysphoria of all kinds turns your body, your most precious vessel of personhood, into an enemy.

The final shot of the video: Bush and Hervieu together, only now their bodies are still, except for the arc of their arms, which pull back invisible bowstrings. As they look past the camera, they take aim. Neither of them appears to fire the bow, but I feel the psychic arrow strike all the same. That’s God.

*

When I look at old photos of myself, I just see a body. It’s hard for me to remember my life in those other bodies, unlike how I can say that this year’s body feels like the ankle I sprained getting out of a car and the burn on my elbow where it touched the oven door and the bruise on my butt after slipping on a rock face on the path to a river. This year’s body reads the news and weeps. This year’s body notices flowering trees and wipes bugs from its eyes and thinks about God.

Everyone, even those of us without religion, has something in mind when they say, “Oh, God,” in exclamation, in terror, in fervor, in ecstasy. There’s a recklessness to piety, offering yourself in bondage to some entity or idea that is ultimately indifferent about you. But it takes an incredible amount of faith to transition, even if it’s not something you announce but especially if it is. The first time I told someone I was trans, I stammered and trembled and looked at their face through eyes veiled with tears. I was terrified by what I was saying even as I said it. But I had to feel how it feels, even knowing that my admission could hurt me, because the alternative was alienation from myself and the world.

There’s a recklessness to piety, offering yourself in bondage to some entity or idea that is ultimately indifferent about you.

This is the deal I’d make with God, if I could: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future. But in lieu of God’s handshake, I deal with myself. I began transitioning knowing who I couldn’t be but with only field notes for who I could be. I thought it’d be a lonely voyage, and it can be, sometimes, but one consequence of my work is that other people have reached out to share what it means that I chronicle my journey, in fiction and in personal writing like this. That, more than anything, feels like faith in real time: transitioning as a form of devotion, all of us congregating together to define an eternity worth seeking.

I don’t know what next year’s body will feel like, or the body in the years after that. But I know I can and will live with changes I instigate and changes I can only weather. One could say I’m running up that hill, really committing to the metaphor, no matter what God or some Godlike force might offer me in exchange for stillness.

My resolution takes the form of an arrow through my heart because this is how I remind myself that I’ve hit my target at least once before. Then I pick the bow up and turn toward the next stretch of future. In the end, no one can hunt down the better version of you better than yourself. Thank God for that.